Strormin' Normans

Last year the communities of northern France celebrated eleven hundred years of history with a Happy Birthday Normandie bash www.happybirthdaynormandie.com  Those who joined in were urged to "feel free to awaken your sleeping Viking spirit."  The reference here is to the grant of land around Rouen and the mouth of the Seine by King Charles the Simple to Rollo the Ganger and his seafaring raiders, generally dated to the year 911.  That sort of thing awakens my sleeping Viking spirit, so I'm rather sorry I did not take to my long ship and sail across the Channel.  Now I shall have to wait until 2111!

The Vikings had been raiding the area for some years before Rollo became the first Duke of Normandy.  But they had long since come as settlers, not just pirates.  Charles' grant was really no more that a recognition of political reality, an act of territorial appeasement that was to be the germ of greatness.  It also offered a way of protecting his northern flank from further incursions. 

The settlers, always a minority among the Frankish locals, quickly absorbed the cultural, religious and political mores of their new home, becoming just as French as the French; but they always remained something more, something unique.  Adventures of one season became the new Spartans of the next, a warrior cast of seafaring raiders that became arguably the most effective state builders of the whole of the early middle ages.

In writing about my own Norman ancestry (Norman and Proud, 21 August 2010), I made the following points;

Now settled, the Normans steadily went native, speaking a variety of French and acquiring a taste for wine. But they always remained of singular appearance, not just clean shaven but closely cropped, with heads shaved up the back. As Vikings they were infantrymen but as Normans they became knights, acquiring superb skills in horsemanship.

It seems to me that the other important thing to remember about the Normans is that they never quite lost their ancestral habits. Freebooters they were, freebooters they remained. They became Christian, the builders of some of the greatest religious foundations in both France and England, though they never quite lost their pagan ruthlessness. And they were ambitious; my how they were ambitious, with a hunger for wealth, land and power. They were history’s greatest pirates, opportunists and adventurers.

In a sense the Normans were a nation of younger sons, if can put it like that.  As younger sons they were obliged to make their own destiny, and they did, fanning out across Europe; fanning north to England, fanning south to Italy, where Norman kingdoms were established in Napes and Sicily, fanning to the gates of Byzantium and beyond.  There's was no country for old men.

The most remarkable thing from the perspective of these islands is that in just over a hundred years, nothing at all in the great time sweep of history, the nascent Norman state had risen so far as to be able to overthrow the Saxon monarchy of England, a task that had never quite been achieved by their Viking predecessors. 

In October 1066 William came, he saw and he conquered.  I do not believe the battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest to be one of the most significant events in our history.  It was the most significant, nonpareil. It was to change England forever; it was to change both the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons into something wholly different.  It was the end of England's freedom and the beginning of her greatness.

Before 1066 England had been peripheral to the mainstream of European history.  The country really belonged to the Scandinavian fringe, an appendage at the beginning of the century of Canute's Danish empire.  The Conquest changed all of that.  Now England was locked into the new feudalism and into the mainstream of Christian civilization. The country had emerged for good from a Saxon and Viking twilight to become a player in the centuries to come in the great game of European politics.

In time the Normans became English the English became Normans.  The buccaneering spirit that carried the Normans across Europe was to carry the English across the world.  The Norman Conquest had created a new language, a new culture and a new people; it created a new England. That, it seems to me, is no small achievement.  It is why I have no hesitation in declaring that I am Anglo-Saxon, I am Nordic, I am Norman and, what is greater, I am English.  Is there any prouder boast?